Egghead Central or the Hadron Collider at Cern

Temporarily branching off at a rather sharp angle, this post was sparked off by an article in The Times a couple of days ago on the troubles at the CERN accelerator in Switzerland. 

As an experimental outfit Cern and its Hadron collider is phenomenally expensive to run, requires a huge input of wealth, and has been running for years.  And it has, potentially,  awe-inspiring power to change our world.

So, we have my two favourite words, wealth and power.

Without falling into conspiracy-theory-land, this article led me to ask - whose is the ultimate controlling hand or hands behind Cern?  Where does the power lie to control and, maybe, manipulate, Cern?  

We know it is a joint exercise with many European countries involved, all of whom contribute varying sums to it:  we know there are observers from other countries:  and in-put by scientists from just about every country in the world.

We know Cern, is big and impressive. Left is an aerial photograph (courtesy of the Cern website) of the 17 or so miles of tunnel through which the experiments are conducted.  This concrete lined tunnel runs underground for 17 miles, at varying depths of 50 - 175 metres, beneath the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva.

  In trying to answer my own question, the only information I find at a brief gallop through the web deals almost exclusively with the science side of Cern, basically physicists doing their own thing.  There are the rash of more imaginative sites, with their talk of fascinating things such as ULF (ultra low frequencies) and UHF (ultra high frequencies) used to control weather, and the human system itself (that is scary.)   But however accurate or inaccurate, these sites are still science based.   It's all good stuff, but it's not what this post is about.  This post is about people, and specifically people who wield power. We don't want to wander off into Dan Brown territory.

(Not that I have anything against Dan Brown, you understand. Respect to any writer who can sell as many copies as Danny boy can - and keep their private life moderately private.)

But back to my basic point.  Cern is an organisation which needs huge sums of money to survive, and has the potential to wield real power. It's funded and run by a large,  diffused group of people and countries, of whom most members are non scientists and probably do not fully understand what is going on. 

In any organisation run by groups and committees,who are loosely joined and consist of many disparate interests, there tends somewhere in that set up to be a power base.  It may not be obvious.  It may be quite small. But with such huge sums of money invested, and possible world changing technology involved, surely Cern is not solely in the hands of uninformed politicians and physicists playing their wonderful, glittering games. 

Who takes the ultimate decisions as to which experiment gets the most money?   Who has the power to suggest or veto whatever is decided on?  Where and who are the people, (as opposed to the scientists) the big names, who have control over Cern? 

Am I missing something here?  Am I asking a naive question, perhaps? 

It's just that  I have observed that within every big impressive project involving lots of money and the capacity to influence the way things are, there is always a small group of ambitious, clever men, anxious to get a handle on the goodies.

Well, it's late, and before I lose my credibility entirely, and descend into the script of a Bond movie, I will close down for the night, but leave one question open:


Are there lurkers in the shadows behind the big Daddy Hadron Collider? 

Cherchez le pouvoir . . .